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User blog:Toph's Fanboy/A Creative, Moderate Approach to The Economy
I will begin this blog post by saying that I don't support any of the current economic systems (free-market capitalist, Marxist-socialist, or Keneysian featuring most prominently in my mind), because they all have their flaws. I try to analyze each with the least amount of bias as possible, and try to figure out how to eliminate their problems and combine their best points into one logically coherent system. I will now proceed to explain where I think current economic theory as a whole has gone wrong. The common assumption amongst modern people when it comes to economics, from free market capitalists to the most radical of Marxists, is that an individual finds it necessary to build up a stock of supplies for their own survival before they are able to divide their labors up into anything else, and that therefore their capabilities are ultimately defined by their material situation. What this does not properly take into account, is the fact that organisms always ultimately devote their energy into ensuring the continuity of future generations with their own gene pool through reproduction; driven by instinct, animals are often quite willing to expend prodigal amounts of energy into laborious mating rituals, even if it is at risk to their own survival as individual organisms. Humans differ not by orientation towards life, but by the lack of ultimate instinctual restrictions on how we might expend our energy to achieve this ultimate goal, and thus our capabilities are beyond the capacity of our economic situations to fully define. In other words, the division of human labor is prior to the build-up of a stock and is necessary for this build-up to ever take place, though the acquisition of said stock is ultimately also needed for the organization of this labor to take place and for the requirements of the ongoing survival of human life to be sufficiently met thereby. Labor is conditioned by incentives, but not completely defined by them. Marx once claimed that the materialistic dialectic was readily available within common human experience, and that it could be easily explained within a few sheets of printer's paper (though he never got around to writing this out as he intended to). And unfortunately his followers haven't been very forthcoming about the details of why Marx thought this was so, tending to glorify his views as the genius who recognized the manner in which the world economy progressed to the deteriment of making his views understandable to the common man, and hence the nature of the dialectic which Marx claimed governed world history continued to be obscured rather than clarified by his departure from Hegel. I've taken the time to read The Communist Manifesto ''and to familiarize myself with Marxist literature and with its links to the idealistic dialectic of Hegel, as well as with ''The Wealth of Nations, ''and hopefully I will be able to clarify the subject somewhat. Hegel believed that a idea would be posited within the universal "mind" of the cosmos, only to be revealed as too abstract by its failure to embrace the opposing concept, with the mediation of the logical violence done by positing both concepts in their fullness alongside each other then forming a more universal concept, with history progressing through continual repititions of this process. Marx took issue with what he saw as the mystification by Hegel of the dialectic he beleived to be observable to every man, which mediated the growing disparity between the economic interests of the laboring class and the capitalizing class by having the state imposed its "universal", "Christian" interests upon them, something he could not stomach with his liberal interest in assuring the rights of the individual against statist policies. With an observant eye, Marx noticed the failure of the German state around him to secure the interests of the laboring class alongside those of the business owners via the corporations as Hegel's ''Philosophy of Right ''indicated they would, and on this basis modified the dialectic which "unquestionably" governed historical progress. The logical basis for the Marxist dialectic can be winnowed down to the common experience humans have of their labor first being "posited" in the form of an idea of the imposition of their material interests upon the raw materials of the world, only for this material idea to eventually be contradicted by the material basis of their form of labor within the human collectivity. The material mediation of the violent coercion imposed upon the human condition by positing both concepts alongside each other in their fullness then forming a more universal material concept of the economy, with history progressing through continual repititions of this process until the complete concept of the material dialectic developed within Marx's mind is imposed upon the material world in a Communist utopia in the interests of the progress of the individual's interests within the human community. (Why he didn't simply resign himself from the Hegelian bias towards the dialectical progression of the ideas of history altogether once the synthetic Absolute of the Hegelian system failed to manifest itself clearly in world history, if he truly was searching for an objective understanding of the progress of the human condition during his times and not falsely declare his ideas absolute, is beyond me. It would seem more logical to accept that the complete cessation of clinging to a particular manner of understanding the universe enables one to overcome the limitations on one's understanding of the Eternal beyond the now-universal stream of consciousness given by the subjective inclinations of individual experiences within said stream of consciouness as the grounds of the scientific understanding of the human condition, and that the reconcilation of life to the eternal grounds of the world accomplished thereby assuages the suffering intrinsic in the process of clinging to such temporary ideas and is thus responsible for the human progress in economics as well as in all other areas, and such an option has provided the basis for my experimental economic theory as explained above.) What neither Marx nor Hegel took into account was the fact that Adam Smith changed the initial focus on the build up of wealth having its source in the division of labor to the accumulation of stocks midway through the book (according to my copy of ''The Wealth of Nations at least), seemingly to funnell economic development back into agriculture and away from industrial civilization in order to theoretically conserve the members of the nation artificially against the build-up of wealth in an ad hoc manner. Because of this fatal alliance of the unprovable Hegelian dialectic with the wrong-headed declarations of Adam Smith concerning the basis of world economic growth, Marx unneccessarily invoked coercive accumulation of a communal stock as a necessary condition for the progressive division of labor. He automatically assumes that the community could resolve the contradictions between the social system of labor and the means by which this labor was enforced upon the material world only through securing the social system of labor within the hands of the people who were once its means of labor by violent social revolution reaching into every area of community life. This background gave rise to the superstitious ideology of the labor theory of value (the idea that one is robbed if one cannot afford the results of one's labor) which to lead to the vicious wage-interest spiral as its natural consequence: the unions lobbying for higher pay against the business owners to accumlate wealth for the workers, causing the businesses to hike up the prices of their products so that they could keep making a similar profit, decreasing the relative value of the laborer's pay and thus decreasing their demand for the supply of products relative to their demand for more pay, eventually causing the supreme irony of a market crash due to inflation that characterized the Great Depression. From these circumstances, came the ridiculous half-breed known as Kenyesian economics, where the socialist's desire to accumulate wealth for the lower class was co-opted via government hand-outs for the purpose of funneling their demand for the products of the corporations, suffocating the potential of both classes in the process with the taxes to accumulate the money "necessary" to re-interest the laboring consumers in the products of business in a pseudo-Fascistic manner (given its unlimited trust in the state's ability to define the totality of the state's interests better than the parts themselves which is also the key quality of all Fascist governments). Because of these flaws in the current approaches to the economy, my suggestion is that corporations be made to pay the consequences if they fall below a certain minimal stock-laborer ratio by which the common motive amongst the laborers and the business owners to divide one's labor in a way which preserves life (rather than their divisive economic interests) and thus the need for co-operation rather than coercion to create business are emphasized, the minimal amount being determined experimental study as to the overall cosmopolitan benefits produced thereby, beyond which corporations and labor unions have complete freedom to interact as they please. This should be done through voluntary political associations (by picketing the businesses which don't meet the quota, and similar non-violent forms of activity), but secondarily through raising a small percentage upon the businesses which don't meet the quota, with the amount of money gleaned off of these taxes is paid towards the national debt . If a tax is imposed, it should be small and set in stone legally; however, the quota itself should be open to the results of experimental study as to what amount of extra workers works best beyond the minimum amount the business hire out of their short-term interest in acquiring the greatest amount of money possible at the least price to themselves. Simultaneously, taxes should be reduced or eliminated overall for all levels of the economy, but more so in the corporate sector than elsewhere, the stand-alone "stock-laborer ratio" tax being the sole exception to this overall taxing restructure. I admit that this does not vie well with the sentiment of showing pity to the impoverished through the helping hand of a government-supervised economy, but it does have the benefit pushing the corporations to gather back together the members of the laboring class suburbanized by the use of Kenyesian economics (something which Marxist economicists brought to my intention) in order to pursue their own interests, so that they may more effectively lobby for better working standards and (more importantly) for further inclusion of more members of the working class. In this manner, the corporation's individualistic pursuit of their own interests at the expense of society may be bought out by a more efficient social working machine guarding its members against the ruinous centripedal force of greed on the whole, both on the part of the business leaders and on the part of the government officials (effectively a corporations whose primary investment is in their citzen's welfare, which may just as easily be mismanaged by human greed as any other corporation may be). The biggest difficult of pursuing my creative, moderate economic policy is the difficulty of calculating the proper ratio and the proper relative tax rates which would produce the best overall benefit. I am more of a political theorist than I am a policy maker, and it would be preferrable that more practical-minded people be made aware of the benefits of this ideology who would be more able to figuring out ways of calculating the needed quantiies and putting the theory into practice. So I figured it would be best to make both conservatives and liberals aware of the possible overall benefits of the theory's application for society by promoting it on websites such as this. Category:Blog posts